The Tombstone Exercise

Hey! Today we're introducing a new column at Every: No Small Plans by Casey Rosengren. It will be published bi-monthly and explore what it means to play bigger in life and work.

Casey is a founder and executive coach based in New York who's written for Every about living by your values, peer coaching, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Weaving in research from psychology, philosophy, and organizational behavior, he'll explore what it means to do work that matters and live well in the face of mortality.

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“Everyone, get back in the building. NOW!”

It was early 2021, and my partner and I were visiting my sister in Hawaii. We’d spent the afternoon having coffee at one of the fancy hotels that dot Oahu’s shoreline, enjoying the beautiful views of the ocean.

Just as we were about to leave, an officer in full SWAT gear ushered us from our car and back into the lobby.

The police didn’t tell us much about what was going on, just that there were reports of an active shooter somewhere on the premises. For the next several hours, nearly 100 of us sheltered in place in the hotel lobby.

We would find out later that we were lucky—the shooter had barricaded himself in his room, and we were never in any imminent danger. But for those first few hours, we had no idea what we were dealing with or how perilous the situation was.

Existential psychologist Irv Yalom writes that brushes with death can be clarifying, pointing toward one’s unlived life—the life we’d be living if we were honest with ourselves about what was important to us and had the courage to align our lives with that desire.

My experience that night was no exception. Reflecting that night, I felt generally good about my work, and I was grateful for my friends, family, and my partner. However, at the prospect of an untimely death, there was one place where I felt like I had unfinished business.

I wanted to write.

I’d written in fits and starts since 2020, but as life got busy and other projects took precedence, writing had fallen to the wayside. 

Things didn’t change immediately; it took many months for me to fully commit to making writing a consistent part of my life. But my experience that night stayed in the back of my mind, and eventually, I made writing a priority.

How can we awaken to our unlived life outside of a near-death experience or major crisis? 

One way to do this is the tombstone exercise from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). 

The exercise involves writing your epitaph, which is an inscription written on a tombstone summarizing what your life and behavior has been about. In this exercise, we explore both an ideal epitaph and a feared epitaph.  

The ideal epitaph represents your values, encapsulating the kind of person you want to be and the life you’d like to have lived, looking back from your deathbed.

The feared epitaph is an epitaph written as if you died today, summarizing what your life and behavior has been about. As such, it can be a powerful way to shed light on your unlived life—the gap between your values and how you’re currently living. 

This exercise is most powerful when you engage with the fact that you will die someday, and genuinely ask yourself how you might want others to remember you and what you were about.

To get a sense for how it works, let’s explore an example of how I’ve used it in my own life.

A real-world example

A few years ago, I was going through a career transition, trying to decide what I wanted the next phase of my life and work to be about. To get some space to explore the decision, I signed up for a self-guided retreat at a monastery in upstate New York.